﻿### How to Get Orchard

So hopefully you are convinced that Orchard is worth checking if you are evaluating a CMS for your next website. Next question then is how do I get it. There are three primary ways to get Orchard installed and up and running on your machine. 

#### Web Platform Installer

The first option is to use the Microsoft Web Platforn Installer. Web PI is a great little tool put up by the Web Platform Team at Microsoft, which is designed to make it easy to install a large varieaty of tools and applications taht can be used for Web development on Windows. For example you can install the actual development tools like Visual Studio Developer Express which is feely available or SQL Server express and Web Matrix. You could also install smaller component like individual IIS modules, for example the Url Rewrite module, and you can install web applications like WordPress, Umbraco and ofcourse Orchard.

#### Web Matrix

The second option is available if you already have Web Matrix. you can install and most of the other Web Applications available under Web PI right from under Web Matrix itself. This is actually a very nice workflow where you can run Web PI once to install Web Matrix, and then you use Web Matrix to install the applications an frameworks that yo'd like to use to build your Websites. We'll go through the steps of doing this later.

#### CodePlex

The third option is to obtain the package release or the source code for Orchard itslef directly from CodePlex. The Downloads tab on the CodePlex site contains a ZIP file which is the same package that you would get from Web PI or Web Matrix . It also contains links to ZIP files containing the full source code. However if you'd really like to dig into the code, specifally if you plan to do any of your custom module development in Orchard, probably you just want to just clone the source code repository. The Orchard project uses the Mercurial version control system, and there are a number of good resources online for getting started with Mercurial whether or not your a not familiar with that system and would like to use it for Oarchrd. So lets go ahead and use Web Matrix to create our first Orchard Website.